Gosh, what a year! Working on Vagrus has been super busy but very rewarding - in no small thanks to people like you, dear followers, whose contributions and feedback made a lot of things possible for us here at Lost Pilgrims. So let me thank you for everything and wish you very happy holidays on behalf of the whole team! Have fun, hang out with family and friends, and check out the Prologue of Vagrus!

Well, we have just passed another major milestone in our content creation progress.

As mentioned in our post last week, with our Prologue ready from a content perspective, our writers have been already working on the Early Access stories for Vagrus.

In the Prologue we have well over one hundred thousand words worth of story and lore coming together from Events and Codex entries. Actually, even a bit more since the Narration and Tutorial texts are coming through another source and so are not included in the above numbers. Those two make up over four thousand words on top.

There's been a lot of talk lately of the Prologue, so much in fact that it's easy to forget about the rest of the game. We can assure you we haven't though, and been hard at work on the content that would feature in the Early Access release. The vast majority of the currently completed content is writing but artwork (both character and environment) is a close second.

It seems we are getting into the habit of sharing project updates monthly now - there is just so much going on. To make the best use of your time, let's jump right in!

Social Media

We have got an awesome two months behind us since our last social media update. The most important development was that we put additional effort into regularly publishing news about Vagrus on major gaming portals like Steam, GameJolt, Itch.io, and IndieDB. And it paid off! We have gathered over a thousand new followers on those platforms. Just during the four days of being featured on GameJolt, more than five hundred fans signed up to follow our journey.

The TIME is approaching! We are opening up our Prologue Alpha testing soon, folks!

   - So I can just apply & play the demo before everyone?
   - Well, you get to see the game early but you actually have to test & report bugs. 
   - OK! When?
   - When we get to 1k+ followers on Game Jolt. So go and share this!

In the last part of our character design series, we talked about what goes into conceptualizing and designing characters and touched upon how Bazsó came up with distinct the art style for characters and how Szonja raised the bar when working with the majority of them.

Now it's time to discuss what actually happens after the initial phase of concepts and moodboards. Mind you, this will probably have information that is well-known by any graphic designers who work on 2D character art; yet others may find it intriguing.

2 months after our first devlog post about Vagrus yesterday we crossed 800 followers on GameJolt.com!

Huge thank you to Yaprak, Cros (co-founders of Game Jolt) and all our fans on this awesome #indiegame portal!

Vagrus - The Riven Realms is a game rich in storylines and quests, and most of these appear in the form of what we call Events: text based interactions where your choices guide the story. There are a lot (and I mean a LOT) of these Events and due to their nature, writing for the game involves quite complex scripting and a non-linear narrative design angle. But what does this mean in practice and what does it involve?

Time for another project update! Seventy-seven days have passed by and even though it was summer - supposedly calmer times - it felt pretty frantic. In the good sense.

A huge Thank You! and wishing all the best to Marci

As your might remember, our previous post started with the news of Marci joining the team to complete his summer internship with us for his degree in software development. Marci has been instrumental to the progress we made on the Codex & Journal functionality and UI, as well as to catching up on our design documents. Now that he has returned to his studies, we wish him all the very best for his goal of finishing his Bachelor's degree. We're pleased to see that he is on the right track to become a great game developer!

It's spring 1990 and I'm in elementary school. My best friend brings a book to school that he reads aloud to a small group of us during our big walks at lunch break. The book has a weird old wizard on the cover conjuring smoke from a crystal ball. More interesting are the illustrations on the inside: intricate black and white drawings of strange fantasy creatures and dungeon locations. The little book is Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson's Warlock of Firetop Mountain, translated to our native language. Most of you probably know that it's a gamebook that you do not read from start to end but in branching numbered chapters that make the story personal and add replayability. Yet they are much more than simple choose-your-own-adventure books because they include a stat and combat system you have to manage throughout the adventure - albeit a really simple one.